Discover Top Posts Tagged with #hydrophyllum

Spring ephemerals: Virginia waterleaf (Hydrophyllum virginianum), wild geranium (Geranium maculatum), Trillium grandiflorum, Virginia bluebells (Mertensia virginica)

May 2025

#spring ephemeral #woodland #forest #flower #hydrophyllum #geranium #trillium #mertensia

April-May wildflowers 1

Hydrophyllum appendiculatum

Appendage’d waterleaf

rich mesic woods, ILP core,

#hydrophyllum appendiculatum #hydrophyllum #wildflowers #ohio #botany #plantblr

My family is convinced I was kidnapped by forest gnomes when I was a boy and brainwashed into believing nature is more fun than my own kin. They got one part of that right. Seriously, how can a weekend stuck in a tourist trap full of plastic bears and overpriced restaurants compete with 20 minutes of combing through the extraordinary diversity of life crammed into a few square feet of wet rock outcropping in one of Appalachia’s rich, temperate forests? I don’t see how anyone can blame a hopeless nature nerd for choosing the rock.

Top to bottom: Virginia waterleaf (Hydrophyllum virginianum); squirrel corn (Dicentra canadensis); northern maidenhair fern (Adiantum pedatum); heartleaf foamflower (Tiarella cordifolia); purple-flowering raspberry (Rubus odoratus); plantain-leaved sedge (Carex plantaginea): woodland stonecrop (Sedum ternatum); and various mosses and liverworts.

Elizabeth’s Woods was the first tract of land protected by the West Virginia Land Trust as part of Toms Run Preserve. Ensconced on a wooded bluff overlooking the Monongahela River, the tract’s mature hardwood forest has become a local mecca for spring wildflower hunters and birdwatchers. The parcel is named in honor of its benefactor, Elizabeth Zimmermann, who donated it to the Land Trust nearly 25 years ago. This past weekend’s spring bounty included (from top): bloodroot (Sanguinaria canadensis), blue cohosh (Caulophyllum thalictroides); slender toothwort (Cardamine angustata); Virginia spring beauty (Claytonia virginica), distinguished from Carolina spring beauty by its narrower, grass-like leaves; blunt-lobed hepatica (Hepatica americana); bluntleaf waterleaf (Hydrophyllum canadense); and downy yellow violet (Viola pubescens).

After the last leaves of October have fallen, the stone-faced ghosts of the Monongahela River’s industrial past, draped in moss-and-lichen cloaks, reveal themselves to those who are willing to notice them. In an abandoned stone quarry along the Mon River Trail, broken millstones speak muted testimony to the long-silent engines that fired the industrial revolution and poisoned the ground around them. Now, almost a century and a half after the stone was roughly hewn from the steep bluffs along the river and bent to man’s will, nature has reclaimed the quarry for herself, a slow, methodical march won by the most delicate of organisms, including bluntleaf waterleaf (Hydrophyllum canadense), Christmas fern (Polystichum acrostichoides), white bear sedge (Carex albursina), and ebony spleenwort (Asplenium platyneuron).